Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Riddlesdown

Yes. Riddlesdown is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR8. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

A serving hatch through to the dining room was standard, and where it has been blocked up the patch sits on a different plane to the wall either side of it. Half-tiled walls are the norm, and the tile line is what the splash return has to meet, which is a decision taken before machining rather than discovered afterwards. Concrete walls take a bracket well and a chase badly. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A pipe boxing gets a radiused notch, never a square one.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. A vanity is the one piece of stone that route will not usually defeat, because a top cut to a standard unit depth weighs what one person can manage. Nobody carries a drilled vanity top by one end. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. Two pieces and a tube of sealant is the whole delivery.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Work of that kind brings en-suites with it, and an en-suite vanity is a smaller piece again carrying exactly the same four operations. Several vanity tops off one slab run, or they will not match. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where several bathrooms are done in one building the tops come off one slab run, because two greys from two batches sit badly on adjoining floors. An en-suite is the same four operations at a smaller size.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. That shape decides what is left on the slab when the kitchen has been cut, and what is left on the slab is where most vanity tops come from. Offcut stock is the cheapest stone a vanity will ever sit on. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. A vanity has no depth to lose, so where a kitchen run would take a ten millimetre scribe without noticing, a shallow top cannot spare it. The bridge between aperture and back edge is what a notch eats. Settle the tiling height and the basin model first, and let us know whether the unit is standing on the floor or hanging off the wall. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. Approval comes before the aperture is drawn, not after.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Rear extensions on these sit on shallow foundations, and the crack at the junction with the original wall tells you which way it has moved. What that does to a vanity is push the whole job into a narrow depth, because a bathroom takes the same stone as a kitchen in about two thirds of the width. It is the smallest piece we cut and the most crowded.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. A booked window suits a bathroom better than it suits a kitchen.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. A wall-hung unit puts the whole weight into the wall rather than onto the floor, so what the wall is built of stops being a detail. A wall-hung unit is braced before it is asked to hold stone.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. Where the floor falls away the unit is packed level first, because a top that follows a sloping floor announces it against the tile joints behind. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it.